The blessings of doubt

Nice piece today by Michiko Kakutani in the NYT, on how Obama is a product of the books that he studies and dissects and selectively ingests.

One salient passage:

Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books -- Natan Sharansky's "Case for Democracy," which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen's "Supreme Command," which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr's writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

Niebuhr. That wise and supple student of human frailty and divine hope. I suspect that well-meaning Christian politicians and commentators and voters in America would have had a far more beneficial impact on the nation they love if they packed more Niebuhr and less Hannity.

Looking back on President's Bush's lost promise amidst his attempts at "moral certainty," I think of a line by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton:

"The fruitfulness of our life depends in large measure on our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility . . . If we believe ourselves in part, we may be right about ourselves. If we are completely taken in by our own disguise, we cannot help but be wrong."

Yet if Christians took their own theology seriously, with its central emphasis on a human fallenness that cannot be conquered by human power, it would be impossible for them to function other than as Merton proposes.

Why does the Christian church fall so short?

For one thing, moral relativism and distrust of "absolute truth" have become the prevailing viewpoint among leading academicians and authorities. In such a view, "evil" becomes a quaint or small-minded concept. Christians rise up to say that, yes, 9/11 is evil, and Saddam's tyranny is evil, and that no amount of philosophizing can get us away from the fact that evil is in our world and must be combatted.

The problem is that the New Testament revelation isn't merely that evil exists; it teaches that evil exists in all of us, and that we cannot therefore go marching off as perfectly (or even largely) decent Crusaders against evil. The battle begins with the evil in ourselves, not in Baghdad.

Yet it is easier, and more exhilarating, to rail against the evil in others, and to cheer on our soldiers as saints as they go off to blow those evildoers up.

Muslims face a similar dilemma. Some believe jihad, or holy struggle, involves a war against an evil outside world, and the bomb-throwers take it to an extreme level; but many understand jihad as a holy struggle within one's own soul, a war between the selfish and noble parts of our soul.

But demagogues in any part of the world can harness crusades and jihads for their own ends, and the result is a civil religion that ignores a religion's own heart in order to stoke the angrier sparks within its followers' hearts.

The question is, what can theologians, pastors and others do to pull their flocks away from the siren songs of jingoistic civll religions that are imposters of the real thing? I think Rick Warren is someone attempting to do his part, even as you may disagree with some of his positions as he prepares for tomorrow's inaugural prayer.